Happy New Year to all!

Yes, we're still here, and we admit to being awefully quiet. But think of our silence as a sign of hard work and over-zealous dedication. In fact, we're so psyched about 2012, we can't help but tease you about some our next features.

But first thing's first. We'd like to take some time and explain what has happpened in 2011. In the fewest words possible, I'd describe 2011 as a milestone year - albeit without any releases to the actual product. This can only mean that we've been working hard on what is to come in 2012. We have re-adjuted our targets and have set a roadmap with very specific feature release dates, starting next week. Our main target is to make Listiki the ultimate destination for Lists.

We've been also very busy rebuilding our infrastructure, by moving Listiki to the cloud. Listiki is now powered by Amazon's Web Services, running on a EC2 instance. We made this move firstly because we wanted a very scalable solution, and secondly, as a bootstrapped startup we need to be able to control our costs at any given time and pay only for what we actually use.

So, while 2011 was an uber slow year for us, as far as releases were concerened, 2012 will be quite the oppposite. Starting next week, we will release one of our biggest requests to date. We'll just say that it affects the core of Listiki, but it's not about the Lists. Stay tuned, because it's on its way...

Also, most of the stuff that we have in store for 2012 more or less revolves around the "more engaging & interactive service" concept. It will be an interesting ride...

Stay tuned, follow us on Twitter

It has been a good couple off weeks for us here at Listiki. We were so pleased to see that we had been featured in TechCrunch and LifeHacker both of which we hold in high esteem so this was a highlight for us! Naturally, there was a surge in traffic as more people became aware of Listiki from these two big boys of tech blogs but also from numerous smaller blogs which we are thankful for.

Some of you may have realised that we went down a couple of times the previous week but we were able to get things under control and managed to get through the sudden increase in traffic.

We have been receiving some very nice comments from all our lovely users and we thank you for taking the time to let us know you appreciate Listiki as well as letting us know your thoughts and ideas - we are taking all your comments on board.

Here’s just one of the comments that made us smile :)

“Since I personally make lists of all kinds of things when I found Listiki I thought I died and went to heaven. - @beasocial1

Thank you and thanks to everybody that has been sending us messages via our Get Satisfaction Feedback tab on the site. This is what makes it all worth it. We are so excited because the reaction has been immense and this is just the beginning. We have plenty more exciting features to come and should be pushing a couple of these out in the next few days. 

In the mean time, here’s our top 3 lists for the week:

1. The 1000 things everyone should do before they die
   Started by Heather Brockman - This is a great idea for a list to get people involved and start contributing. There’s 10 things on he list so far so just 990 to go!
2. Best list of collaboration-related sites and books
   Started by @KareAnderson - Interesting (and extensive) list of reads such as such as Moving from Me to We and Extraordinary Groups. Thanks @KareAnderson
3. If I were President I would...
   Started by @BigQid - My personal favorite! It’s interesting to see what the public would do if given the chance to be president. @BigQid is the creator of the list and sole contributor so far. I’m curious to see how this one escalates. 

Ok, that’s all from us for now. Why not head over to Listiki and create your own list now?

As the lists have started to pour in, we have decided to feature our favorite ones in a list right here on our blog.

Here are our very first favorites:

1. Best Paul Graham Essays
   Started by @gtzi - Paul Graham is a well known programmer, and programming language designer and essayist. He is co-founder of Y Combinator which provides seed funding to startups, particularly those that are more tech-oriented. His website now consists of over 100 essays. This Listiki consists of those considered to be the best ones. There were over 100 people on this list simultaneously within the first hour of submitting it!
2. Speakers and themes to have in Aalto Venture Garage 2010-2011
   Started by @lindaliukas - Aalto Venture Garage is a new seed venture accelerator to catalyze world changing startups form Aalto University, Finland. @lindaliukas started this list to get your opinion on speakers and themes to be featured at the Aalto Garage 2010-2011. We like the way she thinks.
3. Favorite True Blood Vamp
   Started by Vanja Arsenov Schleifer - I couldn't resist this one. I am a huge fan of True Blood and Vanja has started a list of our favorite vamps.

Remember that Listiki = list + wiki, so you can go in and add your own items to lists, move things around if your disagree with ranking or even delete items you think should totally not be on that list at all. Have fun.

Wow! It’s already been a month since Listiki launched for all! During this time we were really able to get a grasp of the way you were using Listiki, what you loved about it and what you felt needed some work.

We are happy to announce that a new list page has been launched today. It displays a simpler layout, which emphasizes the ‘drag and drop’ functionality that allows you to start contributing instantly.

We’ve added a more complete sidebar where you can get information about a specific Listiki, the original creator, how many people have contributed to it, and sharing options such as with OPML, RSS, Facebook and Twitter.

Many of you will be happy to hear that we have decided to completely eliminate the "save" button. Everything is now saved automatically whenever you modify or create an item. Easy peasy!

While we continue to roll out cool new features, our eyes and ears remain wide open for any suggestions or bugs you might come across. Your feedback is so valuable, we can’t say thank you enough. Take a look here and let us know what you think.

We are excited to announce that less than 48 hours ago, Listiki moved to Public Beta.

This milestone is a major step in realizing Listiki's potential. We are aware that there's plenty of work to be done, especially if we want to get rid of that beta label, but pleased that Listiki is now open for all to use.

Our next steps are to keep our ears wide open for any suggestions or bugs you might find, and of course stick to the plan and continue rolling out features.

We'd like to extend a huge thank you to all those private beta testers who were willing to spend hours on a half baked app, to all those who insisted on trying out a less than intuitive interface, and to all those who stuck around and helped us break the first milestone.

How we got here is a very interesting story, which also includes drama, joy, sweat and lots of love. Now, we aren't going to dive into those details just yet, but we will let you know that it was a fun ride, and we expect it to get even better.

Here's an overview of what Listiki is all about: Listiki, at heart, is a deceptively simple concept: collaborative, live, ordered lists that can be generated by anyone. Listiki will harness the power of the real-time web via Twitter & other social networks to add a layer of context and hierarchy to this massive, constant flow of data. It's a tool that delivers order and relevance for any topic.

Listiki aims to take the way you order and rank your interests to the next level. It allows you to create and gather information from the crowds whether it be friends, colleagues or simply those interested in what you’ve posted and vice-versa, making Listiki a truly useful way to share your own lists and gather information from others in a simple, organized fashion, moreover the user experience is truly a great one.

Like a wiki for lists, anyone can add items and reorder them. These changes are then propagated in real time to a master list or the "average ranking" where you can see the items flying around to their new positions.

On anything from "Best restauenats in Manhattan" to "Worst movie endings", users are asked to provide their opinion in a list, generating a valuable (and sometimes simply fun) collection of opinions. Essentially a canvas for building any type of sorted list. Best of all it all happens in real-time.

Listiki quick walk-through video